beer column

my notes from yesterday evening's beer column on weird beers on cbc radio one's on the coast
during which the poor sick stephen quinn suffered a coughing attack and could barely participate
oh the joys of live radio!

Did you see the new helium beers debuting from SamAdams and Stone Brewing?Who would have
thought you could put helium in beer, let alone that two breweries would race
each other to the post to be the first to produce it.

Oh right, it’s April Fools' Day.There is no helium beer.

But there are crazy and creative beers out there that
are no joke! Let’s take a quick tour of the
zanier side of craft beer.

The craft beer community has embraced all sorts of
brewing innovations, like brewing ales with lager yeast, adding different
ingredients such as botanicals in the place of hops to experiment with
different flavours, the hop wars and the highest alcohol content contest.

There are also interesting flavours brewers around
the Lower Mainland and across the United States have been
experimenting with. Locally first, Storm Brewing's James Walton is always
coming up with interesting flavour twists. Earlier this Spring he brewed a dill
pickle IPA. I was fortunate enough to get to try it on cask at St. Augustine's. And I really liked it. I am
a big dill pickle fan, and an IPA fan, so it probably wasn't that much of a
stretch for me, but I did see some pretty interesting facial expressions on
some of the other St. Augustine's
patrons when they heard about the cask. I asked James how he got the dill
pickle flavour in the IPA. He told me that he took his mother's dill seeds and
suspended them in alcohol for six years. Six years! Now that is dedication to
your craft.

New Belgium Brewing beers are imported into Vancouver by Beerthirst,
so if you haunt your local specialty beer store, you should have come across
beers from their Lips of Faith series.The coconut curry hefeweisen is flavoured with coconut, cayenne,
cinnamon, coriander, fenugreek seek, ginger root, kaffir and lime leaf, with a
hint of banana from the hefe yeast.

Illinois' Mamma Mia pizza beer is
actually is made with a whole margarita pizza in the mash and plenty of pizza
spices to enhance the flavours of oregano, basil, garlic and tomato. I want to try this beer!I figure it must taste something like Storm's
basil ipa, which I love. If anyone is in Illinois
and wants to bring me back one, I'd appreciate it!

Also not available locally is Michigan's Short's Brewing Company's Key
Lime Pie, which is made with fresh limes, milk sugar, graham crackers and
marshmallow fluff. The prominent sweet-meets-tart flavour won a Gold Medal at
the 2010 Great American Beer Festival. If you're travelling around Michigan, try to find
this one. And again, if you want to bring one back for me, I wouldn't say no!

Freetail Brewing in San AntonioTexas
brews a green beer - it is coloured pale greeny blue from the addition of
spirulina. Perfect for St. Patrick's day, if you happen to be in the San Antonio area!

Moving away from flavourings now, we arrive at beer
for non-humans.Specifically beer for dogs.

Dog beer is only sort of beer. It does not have the
four traditional ingredients in it as hops are toxic to dogs. It also doesn't
have alcohol in it, so fido won't be hungover in the morning. Bowser Beer,
which has been available in the US
for several years, is a non-carbonated mixture of meat-broth and malt barley,
with glucosamine added for joint health.

Locally, Moon Under Water in Victoria began brewing
their fundraising beer for dogs in August last year. It comes in two flavours,
Beef & Barley Dunkel and Chicken & Peanut Pilsner, which feature beef
or chicken stock, salmon oil and glucosamine to promote healthy fur and joints.
There is also a Dog Beer in Australia.
Which just shows you how wide-spread the urge is to share man's greatest
beverage with man's best friend.

Which takes us to man’s other best friend, his beard.And beer brewed with yeast propagated from
the brewer's beard.

Rogue's Beard Beer is brewed with a yeast created
from Brewmaster John Maier's Beard. Rogue says it is perfectly normal to brew
beer from beard yeast "Brewers have used wild yeasts in beer making for
centuries. John has had the same Old Growth Beard since 1983 and for over 15,000
brews, so it is no great surprise that a natural yeast ideal for brewing was
discovered in his beard." Most beer nerds who tried it, and alas I was not
one of them, agreed that it was a decent enough beer, but they probably wouldn't
drink it again.

For more weird beers, check outthese articles, which includea beer that uses yeast from a hornet's abdomen;
one that uses a strain of yeast over 45 million years old; beer made from
coffee brewed from elephant pooped beans that sold for $100 a bottle; Sapporo
Space Barley beer, brewed in 2009, which featured barley from the International
Space Station; and Dogfish Head's Celest-jewel-ale contained dust from lunar
meteorites. There is no end to creativity in beer brewing!

However, I think the most recent entry into the weird
beer sweepstakes takes home the prize for my weirdest beer. To commemorate last
weekend's season finale of AMC’s hit series “The Walking Dead,” a Philadelphia beer company
brewed up a smooth, pale American stout. So far not weird at all right? Sure,
right up until they put goat brains in it! The Dock Street Brewing Co. created
the Dock Street Walker for die-hard zombie fans. It is brewed
using wheat, oats, flaked barley, organic cranberries (for a nice bloody red
hue) and smoked goat brains. Dock Street head brewer Justin Low said
that Walker
contains “intriguing, subtle smoke notes” thanks to the addition of the brains.

And, just to really make you shake your head, that
wasn't the first time that animal heads and their contents have been used in
beer brewing… Michigan’s
Right Brain Brewery makes their Mangalitsa Pig Porter using actual pig heads and
bones. The beer took home a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in
2011 in the Experimental category. It is only made once a year, and they say
that the Mangalitsa Pig Porter is rich, chocolatey and “infused with a symphony
of salty, smoky and savory flavors.”

I thought after that list of weird
and wacky beers that I would keep this week's beer picks in the realm of the
experimental, but much more down-to-earth:

First up, a collaboration beer
between Victoria's Hoyne Brewing and Driftwood Brewing, the RockBay
mash-up, is available in 650 ml bombers at specialty liquor stores in the city.
Half a baltic
porter was brewed and fermented at Hoyne, half at Driftwood. The brews were
then combined by running a hose across their connecting parking lot. Available
in both Hoyne and Driftwood designed bottles.

Secondly, head on over to East Van
and try an infused beer at Parallel 49 and Bomber Brewing. Both tasting rooms
have a randall - a tubular tower they fill with fresh ingredients and force
beer through to get unique infused flavours. They change the ingredients daily,
so follow them on twitter to find out what the flavour of the day is.

i didn't always love beer - there was a time in the distant past where i just didn't have a taste for it. fortunately my taste buds changed just around the time folks started brewing really tasty beer. my love affair with beer began. slowly at first, eventually blowing itself up into my current obsession with all things beer. i really like drinking beer. i also enjoy reading about beer, talking about beer, thinking about beer and watching people brew beer.